Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Button Wednesday : Patrick Kelly

This Button Wednesday is about fashion designer Patrick Kelly. As a teenager I began collecting pictures of fashion designs from magazines and glued them all in many scrap books, which I still have :) One of those books was dedicated to buttons (and yes, the button disease started very early with me...). When I looked into that scrap book last week, I saw the pictures of Patrick Kelly's famous button dresses and thought I have to show them to you and tell you a bit about Patrick Kelly.

I found out that The Brooklyn Museum had a Patrick Kelly Retrospective in 2004. I shortened their introduction a bit and here it is:In the 1980s the young African American fashion designer Patrick Kelly took Paris by storm, becoming the first American member of the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter (the governing body of the prestigious French ready-to-wear industry). A native of Mississippi, Patrick Kelly was influenced during his early years by the creativity and fashion sense of his female relatives, who often added embellishments to simple store-bought garments, as well as by the fashion magazines his grandmother brought home from the white household where she worked as a domestic. As a young adult, Kelly moved to Atlanta, where he sold recycled clothes and worked without pay as a window dresser at the Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche Boutique. He later lived in New York, where he attended Parsons School of Design. It was in Paris, during the mid- to late 1980s that Kelly found his greatest success. He began by selling dresses on the street and working as a costumer for the nightclub Le Palais. His flamboyant garments became soon popular, and he started to make collections in 1985. Such well-known stores as Henri Bendel, Bloomingdale’s, and Bergdorf Goodman carried his Paris designs, and celebrities Cicely Tyson, Bette Davis, Grace Jones, and Isabella Rosellini were among his clients. Sadly he died from AIDS in 1990 at the age of 35.

Some of Kelly’s most memorable garments incorporated masses of multicolored buttons. Rightly, you can call him the fashion king of buttons.

I also found a great interview with Patrick Kelly on the net; it gives a good insight in his character and his career. You can see it here.

He did not only made button dresses, he made everything with buttons, like these gloces, and his giant button brooches.

Have you seen a lovely, beautiful, stunning, crazy button or button-related thingy, or did you make something with a button / buttons, or did you even make buttons yourself, blog about it on your blog on Wednesday, and give the link here in the comments so that everybody can enjoy it !!